Great question!
By definition, tragic
heroes are those characters who experience a reversal of fortunes -- typically as a
result of their hamartia, or tragic flaw. Conventionally speaking, a tragic hero suffers
a horrible outcome directly as a result of a poor decision or a foolhardy
action.
In the case of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," however, the eponymous
Prince of Denmark finds himself beseiged from all sides from characters who
force him to act. Whereas most tragic heroes are victims of their
own undoing, Hamlet actually spends the better part of the five-act play (Shakespeare's
longest) not doing, which is to say doing little more than
pontificating, plotting, and exchanging in alternately high-minded sophistry and
low-brow toilet humor in a vain attempt to distinguish truth from faleshood. Unlike the
average tragic hero, Hamlet actually does very little of his own accord over the first
three acts of the play, choosing instead merely to react to those situations which
unfold around him, all the while growing increasingly paranoid and allienated from his
innermost circle of friends and family members.
Stated simply: Hamlet
does not know who he can trust, and he is crippled by his inability to act. If he has a
tragic flaw, it is that he is obsessed with discerning absolute truth before commiting
even the slightest of actions (as he famously tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern "'Tis
nothing either good nor bad, but thinking makes it so"). Tragically, the one time that
Hamlet opts *not* to painfully discern veracity from falsehood results in him
inadvertantly slaying Polonious through the tapestry, and thus he ultimately sets in
motion the tragic series of events that will result in all of the major characters in
this play.
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